Overview
What is teamwork? How can you “have it”? This guide will tell you what it takes to make a valuable contribution to your team, and how to take advantage of the most powerful strategy in Awesomenauts.
Introduction
If you don’t want to read the whole guide and you just want the most important information, then skip to the section: Taking Attendance.
Awesomenauts is a game in which the team that works together the most efficiently wins. This guide will give you useful insights from a veteran about what you can do to strengthen the teamwork of your team in order to give you the best chance at winning. This guide is not about how to play a specific character, comp, or map. It is important to keep in mind that like any other team-based multiplayer game, there will be times when you lose and it isn’t your fault. You can do everything in your power to succeed and still fail, that’s just the nature of the game.
Roles of the Game
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Every team has certain responsibilities they need to accomplish in order to win. If you end up on a team of 3 assassins, somebody still needs to clear droids, and somebody still needs to push turrets. You might be a squishy naut, but if one of your teammates is in dire need of some tanking, you better forget your role and start tanking for them. You can’t behave selfishly just because your character archetype says you’re not fit to do one task or another. Sometimes you need to play a different role than you’re comfortable with, even if your abilities aren’t suited for the task at hand.
Besides the standard roles like harrasser, tank, and support, there is also a slew of sub-roles that you can flow in and out of every game:
- Carry: The player that is the most effective at securing kills. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the most skilled team member, just that they have the right toolkit for that particular game. If you notice someone on either your team or the enemy team stand out as a carry, you should adjust your strategy around that player to boost or dampen them accordingly.
- Frontline: A player that is good at making the enemy burn their abilities. This can be accomplished by either tanking the damage, or simply juking it. Either way, a frontline is a confident player who doesn’t die easily, and sets up the rest of their team for kills.
- Bait: Somebody who tries to set up their team for kills by luring the enemy into a trap. Anyone can play the bait, it just takes a little finesse. Try to expose yourself just enough so that the enemy team will think it’s safe to chase you, but not enough that they can actually kill you.
- Backline: Stays in the back of the team, usually out of necessity, and waits for things to heat up before engaging. A backline can contribute by following up their team with a large burst, healing their team, or counter-initiating with a defensive ability.
- Distraction: This can be a mobile naut, or a player who is good at juking that infiltrates enemy-controlled territory in order to distract the enemy team. They can harrass enemies, chip down turrets, or steal creeps from the enemy’s jungle, but their primary purpose is to give their teammates some room to breathe.
Your role is not set in stone, it is fluid, and the more you resist that notion, the harder you will make it for the rest of your team. You may not have a frontline, backline, harrasser, counter-initiator, pusher, support, etc. If your team composition doesn’t provide a clear answer for any of these roles, you may need to adapt and find a build (or combination of builds) that can fill them. The tools are at your disposal, and your toolkit includes your teammates.
Maybe you’ve gotten comfortable playing the initiator for your team. If you just can’t seem to make it work against a certain comp, and you end up dying every time, then it’s time to rethink your strategy. Don’t just keep trying the same approach over and over while expecting your team to adjust their playstyle around you. Sometimes you are the one who needs to change their behavior to accomodate their team. It can be very uncomfortable, but it’s better than repeating the same mistakes and costing your team the game. If nothing else, your team will notice and give you kudos for being self-aware.
Forming a Strategy
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To get us started, here are some of the factors you should consider when starting every game:
- Composition: What roles do the nauts on your team fill? What roles do the nauts on the other team fill? Composition (comp for short) serves as a “quick-start” guide for your team’s overall strategy. It lets you know which possibilities are open to you. Any naut can be built to fill any role, but it is way smarter to try and divide the workload between your team in a way that makes sense. The great thing about Awesomenauts is that almost any combination of nauts can work, but a balanced composition is generally better.
- Player Skill: Skill can come down to each person, or even what character that person is using. You should be careful when playing against people of high skill and do not take them lightly. They will be using unconventional strategies which can take you by surprise. If you don’t know the level of skill the other team possesses, it’s best to play low-risk until you figure out who’s dangerous. If somebody on your own team is lacking skill, it may be in your best interest to act as a chauffeur for that person.
- Synergy: Everyone prioritizes things differently, and in Awesomenauts, there are a lot of things to prioritize. Some people just prioritize objectives in a similar way to you, they will be there when you need them and act almost as if they’re taking commands straight from your head. They always know what you want them to do without ever having to communicate. Having great synergy comes from your team prioritizing tasks efficiently.
- The Map: Maps are a huge part of the diversity in Awesomenauts. Certain strategies work better on certain maps so you need to assess how all the other factors play together on each map by familiarizing yourself with them. Maps will have an effect on your build, build-order, and maybe even your character choice, and these all play into how well you can support your team.
Lose Yourself
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Let’s say you’re starting a fresh game and this is the team you have.
You might count 3 total players on your team, with 3 separate health bars, and 2 abilities each, but that is fundamentally incorrect. You are one cohesive unit. You have one health pool, and 6 abilities. You might think you’re separate from your team because you can split off and walk away from them, but in almost all cases, you will be more powerful together than you are separated. When your team is together, it becomes greater than the sum of its parts and that is the secret to winning games in Awesomenauts.
Sometimes, you will need to separate from your team to do something, but that does not mean you’re doing it alone. You’re only a part of a larger organism. Your needs are really the team’s needs, and your team’s needs are yours as well. If a member of your team dies, it makes you weaker, and the enemy team can easily overwhelm you if they stick together. That’s why it’s important to be mindful of the amount of time you’re away from your team. If the enemy team sees the opportunity to collapse on one of you while you’re alone, there isn’t much you can do about it. Likewise, you should always be on the lookout for opportunities to engage an enemy when you outnumber them.
Sometimes you’ll be low on health, or have a large sum of solar to spend, but before teleporting back to base you should see if you’re still needed on the field. Maybe the enemy team is getting ready to push, and you can make the difference between losing your turret and taking a small amount of chip damage. You need to act on behalf of your team when they’re not available. Be wary about the frequency and timing of your teleports, being gone too frequently or leaving at the wrong time can be disastrous for your team. Watch your teammates’ behavior and try to accomodate them when they want to teleport as well, it’s often not a good idea to leave 1 member of the team alone on the field.
One Health Pool
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Another way to have exceptional teamwork is by allocating healthpacks according to which team member it would benefit the most. It doesn’t make sense to take a creep if you have full health and your teammate is at 50% health. Remember: you all have one health pool. Your teammates’ health is a resource you can utilize just like your own. Preserving and even gaurding creeps for your teammates can be very beneficial to the overall productivity of your team.
Sometimes it isn’t so simple. Who should get the creep if both team members have 50% health? This depends heavily on the situation. If you have a Clunk at 50% and a Froggy at 50%, then Froggy should probably take it, because he has lower maximum hp, and Clunk can easily heal himself using Vacuum Bite. Let’s say though, that Clunk is at 50% and Froggy has barely any hp. It might be smarter to give the creep to Clunk and have Froggy teleport back to base in this case, since one healthy player can be more valuable than two weak players. You also have to consider the fact that healthpacks cleanse you from damage over time, and giving a person that cleanse can be more valuable than the health itself. There’s also characters who benefit from landing attacks on creeps, like Gnaw and Penny.
All of these considerations make the distribution of healthpacks and creeps among your team a more deliberate process than you might expect at first glance. Don’t just take creeps because “there’s no one around”, there might be someone in dire need of those creeps very soon. A good practice is to hit creeps on your side of the map once in order to weaken them. This way, when your team is in need of healing, they can access the health that much faster.
The Unsung Hero
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Map vision is a huge part in assessing your situation and forming a game-plan, and it changes by the second, so you’ll be making hundreds of judgment calls in a single game. These are the sort of moments that can make or break your game. Let’s say that you see one or more of your team fighting with the enemy. Before you rush to help them, you should ask yourself several questions: Is my team capable of taking care of themselves? Are they just distracting the enemy? Should I take this opportunity to do something else? What happens if I show up just as my team gets killed? You might find that your team made a mistake by overextending, in which case the best action for you to take is to let them die, as sad as that sounds. Most of the time though, you should stop/limit what you’re doing and go at least see how they’re doing.
Knowing where the enemy is on the map is just as important as knowing where they’re not, and same goes for your team. You want to be in the areas with the greatest opportunities for overall benefit to your team, or the places where you can minimize the most damage. If you see that the whole enemy team is pushing your front turret, maybe sacrificing it to get a strong push on their rear turret is a worthwhile trade-off. Perhaps one of your teammates is fighting 1-on-1 with an enemy. If you stop pushing and go help them, maybe that will result in a kill for your team. All the information you need to make these calls is available to you on your minimap, it’s up to you to utilize it.
Communicate
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On a keyboard, the default buttons for commands are 1 (Taunt), 2 (Help), 3 (Defend), and 4 (Attack). Disregarding taunting, the other three commands can greatly improve your team’s synergy. They let your teammates know where your head is at, and what actions you’re likely to take. It can take some getting used to, but using commands is often seen as taking a “leadership” position in your team. Using commands can let you control the ebb and flow of your team’s movements, and it’s generally better if the whole team uses them. Just remember not to spam your team with commands and only use them in critical moments, as this can actually disrupt team cohesion.
These are the most common practical uses of commands from my experience:
- Help: This lets your team know that something important is going on at your location, and you need them to come asap. The most common use is for defending turrets and running from an ambush, but it could also be that you’re trying to secure a kill, and you need extra hands to cut off escape routes. Sometimes people use the help command to signal that they’re about to push a tower, start killing the Solar Boss, or try to take control of mid/jungle areas. Even if it’s too late to call for help, it’s never too late to call for help. Using it after you die can alert your team that there’s something they’ve missed, or to put the pressure on them to team up.
- Defend: As you might expect, you’ll be using this command for defensive purposes, but it can also be used to “talk” to your allies in a very crude language. Say your teammate calls for help. If you don’t have the health to go assist them, or you’ve burned your abilities, you can use this command to let them know you can’t make it for whatever reason. In turn, this will allow them to change their approach as necessary. Another way to use it is to tell your team when you’re teleporting. Your team can see you on their minimap, but they don’t know when you’re about to go back to base, so using this command as you teleport can be a good way of setting their expectations for the next few moments.
- Attack: This command speaks for itself. Use it to let your team know you want them to go ham. People often use this command after their team gets one or more kills. This is because numbers are everything in Awesomenauts, whichever team has greater numbers already has greater potential. There is such a thing as attacking recklessly, however, so never let your gaurd down. This can also be used after you die to tell your team to push forward, or it can be used to tell your team to hold their position until you catch up to them. Either way, this command communicates a willingness to attack.
Voice communication can also strengthen your team’s synergy. You should try to give your teammates information about the enemy’s position and health so they don’t have to rely on the minimap as much. Communicating when you’re about to teleport is also important, as well as whether your abilities are available or on cooldown. If voice isn’t an option, you should try to make an effort to use the in-game text chat to coordinate with your team. It doesn’t need to be thorough, just letting them know what your game-plan is should suffice. If your teammates are receptive, they’ll coordinate with you and let you know how they’d like you to adjust your strategy. Using the text chat also creates a human connection, and allows your teammates to be sympathetic toward you, which builds up trust and increases synergy.
Taking Attendance
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Teamwork is the most powerful strategy in Awesomenauts, the only problem is it’s the hardest strategy to use because you’re only partially in control. Some players have better teamwork than others, but at higher levels, winning usually comes down to which team coordinated better. You can actually overpower a more skillful opponent if your teamwork factor is greater than theirs, which, in my opinion, is part of the beauty of Awesomenauts. Sticking together puts you in the best possible position of countering an initiation, following up your teammates, tanking damage for your teammates, etc. This is why it is critical that you maintain presence.
These are a few key words you should keep in mind:
- Presence is the property of being physically available to your team. The saying “50% of life is showing up” stays true in this game. When you’re near a teammate, your power increases by a factor that isn’t additive, but something greater. And the same principle applies to a 3-man team. This doesn’t mean you will always win battles where you outnumber your opponent, because you also need to use that power in the right way. Also, you can’t always expect your teammates to be near you, and you should consider making an effort to be near them. It’s a two-way street. Maintaining your team’s presence throughout the map is important for minimap vision. If there is a spot on the minimap you can’t see, you should make an effort to change that very soon.
- Laning is the act of switching between lanes. A simple concept, but it has massive implications. Sometimes laning will expose you to the enemy and put you at risk of getting killed, so you need to weigh the risk against the reward of maintaing presence in the other lane. People who don’t lane very often are usually scared of getting bursted, and sometimes staying put is the smart option. Other times, not laning enough will allow the enemy team to waltz in and gain control of mid for no good reason. Laning is extremely important because it gives you better awareness of the overall state of the map and establishes you and your team as a threat. Being perceived as a threat contributes to the psychological aspect of the game, but that’s branching off into another subject.
- Juking is the act of moving in an unconventional or unexpected way so as to make your enemies miss their attacks. Having the ability to either avoid attacks or sustain yourself so that you’re consistently available to your team is a very important skill. If you’re hurt, or you have problems avoiding enemy attacks, then you won’t be available during those critical moments when your team needs you the most. You’ll spend a lot of time walking around looking for health instead of being ready to help your team. Of course, you’re not in this alone, it’s up to your team to try and help you survive as best as they can. Sometimes, the best way to stay alive is to run in the wrong direction and wait for your team to come assist you. As you play more, you’ll get better at dodging and you’ll even start to see opportunities to make your enemies burn their abilities on purpose.
- Ganking is the strategy of combining your team’s efforts together in one short burst to quickly kill an enemy. Ganks typically happen when your team outnumbers the enemy and are normally carried out in the form of an ambush. Using hide areas to conceal yourself or falling down from above the enemy are the two most common style of ganks. Not all ganks will result in a kill, but it is very important to recognize when it is and isn’t safe to continue chasing the enemy. It is a very fine line and takes a lot of experience and a little luck to make the right call. If you notice your team is itching to pounce the enemy, get ready to attack alongside them or help them escape. And be wary of ganks against you or your team. Avoid getting cornered and don’t take risks unless you know your team can back you up.
- Hunting is a team strategy wherein 2 or more players attempt to corner an enemy by cutting off their escape routes in a coordinated attack. These can happen at any time, but mostly when an enemy is in a vaulnerable position, or low on health. These moments are some of the most hectic in the game, because the enemy team will not just throw their hands up and let you take out one of their teammates. Since your team needs to split up to hunt effectively, the enemy might take advantage of this and try to gank one of you while you’re distracted and vaulnerable. You should try your best to help your team hunt whenever possible, but don’t go so far that you allow the enemy team to turn the tables on you. Same thing applies when your team is being hunted. If you’re not careful, you can end up losing more than just one member.
- Tanking is the act of purposely taking damage to reduce the amount of damage being inflicted to a teammate, droid, or other object. As an example, Voltar can tank damage for his Healbot by standing in front of it until it activates. Remember that your team’s health is your health, and when they’re in danger, so are you. Tanking can be applied in many different ways, not just to protect teammates. You may want to tank damage for Skree’s Totem in order to preserve its wall-like properties so it can protect you later from a special attack like Anchor Hook or Pounce. You can tank damage for droids pushing a turret to allow them to inflict as much damage as possible before you retreat. Now you might be starting to understand the implications of managing your team’s health pool, and why you should see it as a resource that everyone shares.
- Bodyblocking is the act of physically obstructing an enemy with your body to prevent them from moving. When your team surrounds an enemy, you can create a cage to hold them in place while you finish them off. If you see an enemy trying to get past you, try to focus on bodyblocking them more than actually damaging them. In all likelyhood, your team will be taking care of that already. Besides that, bodyblocking someone can easily cause them to panic, making your job that much easier. People tend to lose their wits when they feel danger, and start behiving in a predictable way. If you’re being bodyblocked, slow down and look for an opening to escape, you might even need to stall for a bit before you find your opportunity.
- Staggering your abilities is the strategy of holding off from using your abilities at the same time as your teammates. Being in-synch with your team means knowing when they are likely to use their abilities. Most abilities in the game have AOE qualities, so simply holding on to an ability is valuable in its own right. The most common example of wasted abilities is using them on droids. The temptation is high, because it makes you feel like you’re doing something productive, but it’s much more efficient to save your abilities in case an opportunity to use them on an enemy presents itself. The reward for getting a kill on a player is far greater than the reward of clearing a couple of droids slightly faster. The same concept applies to enemy players too. If you basically locked down a kill, then you should save your abilities and finish off the enemy with your auto-attack.
Stop Dying
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Sometimes you’re just better off supporting your team from the back until you can buy the right upgrades. It might be that your character is countered by the enemy team’s comp, or you’re up against more skilled opponents than you should be. In any case, knowing when to cut your losses and only focus on staying alive can sometimes be the most beneficial thing you can do for your team. I sincerely hope it’s not this way forever, since this is a game after all, and no one likes to sit helplessly behind their turret and wait for an opportunity to come to them. Kills potentially matter more than anything else in this game. This is just an unfortunate reality about Awesomenauts in its current state.
Closing
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